I always thought Arduino was very efficient in terms of energy but without doing something special (power-saving modes) the board can be very wasteful!

I was wondering if the Atmega328 can reach the consumption the MSP430 has, if for example you want to build a battery operated device (I always see the M430 inside commercial devices, remote controls/multimeters/etc)

dhenry

You can make an arduino/avr consume more current than a msp430 and you can make a msp430 consume more current than an arduino/avr: current consumption is more software dependent than hardware dependent, regardless of how chip vendors tell you otherwise.

What's truly unique about msp430 is its ability to start its crystal oscillator almost instantly. No one has been able to do that.

Otherwise, quite a few chips have come close to msp430 or beat it in terms of current consumption/Mhz.

The Arduino board-level design is not aimed at being a low-power thing. It has a relatively inefficient regulator, and extra chips that consume current and aren't chosen to be low-power, either.

The Launchpad, since it showcases a chip specifically aimed at low power consumption, does somewhat better at the board level (but also has different behavior, WRT things like max input voltage, etc.)

Chipwise (atmega328p vs MSP430Gxxxx), it's harder to pick a winner. Both are capable of numerous and relatively complex power-saving modes, and the overall consumption of a design tends to depend more on how well you manage to use those, than any particular number specific to the chip itself. It does look like the msp430 chip will have a lower power consumption when "on" at 16MHz (according to spec sheets. About 5mA vs 8mA?)

Yeah, it is exactly the same as Arduino IDE, weird. I remember playing with some MSP430 boards in the university and it was a pain in every sense, even in cost. I ordered a couple of Launchpad to test, for 4.3 usd including shipping!

Why is it be weird? It is a direct fork from the Ardunio Github project. It would be weird if it WASN'T exactly like the Arduino IDE.

I'm just glad someone made the effort since TI didn't seem interested in cross platform support.

Weird because TI for me was always ultra commercially oriented rather than open, so weird = funny to see Energia IDE BTW, TI software uses Eclipse (or netbeans) so it is certainly cross platform.

After 4 days, this saturday a fedex box arrived, with the 2 Launchpads I ordered. Incredible price, the 2 boxes include usb cable, 2 microcontrollers, some pin headers, optional oscilator & quick guide+stickers. For sure TI is trying to hit the electronic market offering this board at this price, just the shipping here probably costs 10 times the price of each Launchpad box. Will do some tests this week to see how it behaves in consumption vs my arduinos